Claws On Scars
by HVK
Summary: More Kingdom Crossovers Zukoline fluff of dubious future canonity! Marceline finds Zuko Firebend-shaving in the morning and decides to take a look for herself with lots of face touching, and it strikes Zuko pretty hard.


Zuko had learned fairly quickly that when it came to Marceline, steadfastly ignoring her was the safest way to keep her from pulling you into her games. Well-aware of her floating in her pajamas just beside the door to his bathroom (and how the hells did she get into his room), he let her avalanche of mismatched words, made-up-on-the-spot slang and disconnected mutterings slide over him like snow, and he was a fire and let it melt without doing him harm.

Eventually she stopped, and just watched him, observing his morning shaving and hair care rituals with an unhealthy level of fascination. "You have hair like a total dork," She said matter-of-factly.

He glanced back at her, bangs like a curtain blocking away the mutilated side of his face from the world. "Your posture is atrocious," he retorted.

She glanced down at herself, perhaps trying to see if her shoulder and back didn't line up as good as she thought. "Even when I'm floating?"

"Espicially when you're floating." This last shot delivered, Zuko turned his attention back to his mirror, pleased that Marceline wasn't in it. She didn't have a reflection, so she might still be behind him, but he couldn't see her being irritating so it all worked out. He breathed in, and out, and heat flushed through his hands, steam rising where his skin met the moisture in the air, and he ran his hands down his face, burning off the beginings of a beard that he was too young to grow without looking scruffy. It was done in a few passes, and left his jaw smooth-shaven and a bit reddened. He blew the heat away and gave his chin a quick examination, just to make sure.

The second pass around his jaw was caught by a cool (and pleasantly so) hand, roughly around the same size as his but slimmer and certainly more worn, clawtips prickling where they met the skin just behind his knuckles. "Lemme see, I got dibs on your dude-skin," Marceline said, so close behind him he could feel the sweet puffs of her breaths dusting the back of his neck. Fox-goosebumps rose on his back, not entirely from fear or surprise but more pleasant (though presently unwelcome) sensations.

Marceline floated around him enough for him to see the trim swell of a gracefully muscular shoulder come into view, skin a compellingly exotic gray-blue coloration, clothes by a slim blue t-shirt that was clearly designed for a boy (and a boy much smaller than she was, Zuko noticed and all too uncomfortably aware of how inappropiately precise the shirt's fold lined out the smooth outward curves from where her waist became the modestly broad swell of her hips and the black shorts that at least did seem meant as sleepwear) and her grinning face, fangs short and blunt enough that he probably did have to assume that she was in an amorous mood and protect himself accordingly, and Zuko unwillingly twisted around in male agony at view of the high ponytail she'd tied her enormous quantity of hair into, it just looked so damned cute and why did she have to be a terrifying she-thing with a lust for blood and so unbelievably beautiful at the same time and he just knew the she knew that combining those two things pushed all his chemical attractions buttons, and there she was pushing an overlong bang right out of her eyes and she had that obnoxiously confident 'I know EXACTLY what I'm doing to you' look, and part of Zuko's mind just growled in frustration (and a smaller part hoped that Marceline wasn't telepathic and mistook the noise for a submissive mating call and another part pointed out that she most certainly would).

Zuko squirmed away, or tried to. "What are you doing! Get _out of-_" Marceline clamped a hand over his mouth, shutting him up in mid-word, and she ran a rough and cool hand from the unspoiled side of his face, claws thick and strong and moving so gently all they did was raise alluring prickles on his skin as her hand traced the remnants of ashen hair.

Her hand explored his face, fingers moving in slow, fascinated patterns and memorizing the slight ridges of his cheekbones, pressing in to feel the exact tension of his flesh over the orbit of his eye. He froze in place, complaints forgotten, when her fingers came into line and ran fingertips with claws retracted over the smooth (almost girlish, he'd been told) hapes of his lips, fingers moving quicker and suddenly slick with moisture that hadn't been there moments before just barely touching the tiny space defined by upper and lower lip, and left his mouth be with an almost regretful quickness of movement.

The claws returned, perhaps so that he could feel the pressure, and when they touched his scar, Zuko flinced. Marceline kept her hand firm on his face and didn't appear to notice. She smirked faintly, hand sliding over the cracked ridges under his eye, the grayish bristles of a half-melted brow, the twisted lump of an ear, and never did her expression betray disgust or pity or anything other than muted interest.

Her palm touched his jawline, and slid along his with an intensity of purpose that left Zuko unable and unwilling to move, and for a moment he let it all go, simply let this fierce and overwhelming woman examine his face and let himself luxuriate in her presence for a moment; it felt good, like being admired (like a beloved trophy, he thought), simply appreciated for being there in whatever insane reason Marceline's twisted brain vomited forth, and Zuko wondered what that odd whistling growl he heard when Marceline tenderly slid her hand off his face was until he realized that it was him.

Marceline, floating just a handspan over the ground, was still tall enough that she would have needed to lean over if she had been standing on the ground; leaned over to press her lips against Zuko's forehead, a bestowment of queenly favor from one warrior monarch to another of equal station. A moment of damp warmness, a heat so intense that it suddenly seemed that Marceline wasn't cold at all but made of a sweet fire that yearned only to evoke more heart-flames in whatever awoke it's strength, and then the vampire was gone, chuckling warmly to herself and floating away, hands clasped behind her back and glancing smugly once at Zuko before she flitted out the door and out of his room.

Zuko blinked for a long time after he left, and only then was he quite confident enough to place two fingers at the spot on his forehead where she'd kissed him. He held them there for a moment, and then with all the leisurely inevitability of a dragon flying down on the hillside and curling up there to hunker down forever, Zuko smiled.


End file.
